Highlighting Grover Norquist’s upcoming appearance on 60 Minutes, CBS’s Bob Schieffer, on Face the Nation, pointed to the anti-tax hike pledge Norquist asks politicians to sign as “one of the problems” undermining the failed “super-committee.”

After ruing the pledge with Republican Senator Pat Toomey, a super-committee member, Schieffer later also hit a Democratic Senator, Joe Manchin, from the left on taxes: “Would you be willing to raise taxes if that’s what it takes to get our financial footing?” Manchin: “You don't need to raise taxes.”) 

Schieffer fretted to Toomey:

One of the problems, Senator, is that so many Republicans — I think 238 Congressmen, 48 Senators, including one Democratic Senator, Ben Nelson, and two Democratic Representatives, plus all of the GOP candidates including yourself, Huntsman did not — signed a pledge sponsored by this group called the Americans for Tax Reform.

The CBSNews.com promotion for the November 20 edition of 60 Minutes similarly holds Norquist culpable: “60 Minutes interviews Grover Norquist, the anti-tax lobbyist many blame for holding up the deficit reduction process - Watch Steve Kroft's report on Sunday, Nov. 20 at 7 p.m. ET/PT.”

(Schieffer did at least also confront West Virginia’s Manchin with a GOP point: “Let me tell you what some Republicans say. They say the President has stood back because in his secret heart of hearts he really wants this to fail so he can bash the Republicans for it to get re-elected.”)

From June: “CBS’s Schieffer Trumpets Coburn’s ‘Candor’ on Willingness to Hike Taxes, Rues Others Lack Such ‘Courage’”

Schieffer with Pennsylvania Senator Pat Toomey on the Sunday, November 20 Face the Nation:

BOB SCHIEFFER: As a member of this super committee, you actually proposed a modest increase in revenues by eliminating loopholes and some deductions. Some people are calling that a tax increase in exchange for some serious spending cuts and some reform that went nowhere. One of the problems, Senator, is that so many Republicans — I think 238 Congressmen, 48 Senators, including one Democratic Senator, Ben Nelson, and two Democratic Representatives, plus all of the GOP candidates including yourself, Huntsman did not — signed a pledge sponsored by this group called the Americans for Tax Reform. Now this is a group headed by Grover Norquist. He’s not a household name but people in Washington are clearly afraid of him. It just so happens that our friend Steve Kroft interviewed Grover Norquist and they’re going to do a story about him tonight on 60 Minutes. Let's just get a little sample of Grover Norquist here.

60 MINUTES EXCERPT
STEVE KROFT: You make it pretty clear, if someone breaks the pledge you’re going to do everything you can to get rid of them.

GROVER NORQUIST: To educate the voters that they raise taxes. Again, we educate people-

KROFT: To get rid of them.

NORQUIST: To encourage them to go into another line of work, like shoplifting or bank robbing, where they have to do their own stealing.

KROFT: You’ve got them by the short hairs.

NORQUIST: The voters do, yeah.
END 60 MINUTES EXCERPT

SCHIEFFER: So there you are. Now you did actually sign that pledge, the Grover Norquist pledge. But you were willing to go ahead and put this plan out on the table. I think he said that if your plan was actually enacted, it would be poison.

The dictionary definition of "stimulate" relevant to a nation's economy is "to rouse to action or effort."

We still have journalists who gullibly relay the notion that extending unemployment benefits and increasing entitlement programs will "rouse" the economy "to action of effort," despite almost three years of evidence that such is not the case. One of them is Andrew Taylor, a writer for the Associated Press, who, in his unprofessionally titled ("Deficit deal failure would pose crummy choice") and painfully long writeup about the supercommittee's lack of action or effort in Washington, wrote the following:

---

Letting extended jobless assistance expire would mean that more than 6 million people would lose benefits averaging $296 a week next year, with 1.8 million cut off within a month.

Economist say those jobless benefits – up to 99 weeks of them in high unemployment states – are among the most effective way to stimulate the economy because unemployed people generally spend the money right away.

Setting aside the garbled structure of the bolded sentence, and not minimizing the suffering of many of the unemployed and their families — exactly how does giving money to an unemployed person "rouse" him or her "to action and effort"? Sadly, in some cases, as will be shown shortly, it does the opposite by discouraging people from temporarily taking jobs they believe are supposedly beneath their dignity or outside of the chosen field.

Taylor, by not adding a qualifier like "some," "most," or even "almost all," writes as if there is no dissent from the view of his unnamed "economists."

Well, yes there is. One of many dissents came from Karen Campbell and James Sherk at Heritage in November 2008 (bolds are mine):

Extended Unemployment Insurance — No Economic Stimulus

… Unemployment Insurance Prolongs Unemployment. One of the most thoroughly established results in labor economics is the effect of unemployment benefits on unemployed workers' behavior. Labor economists agree that extended unemployment benefits cause workers to remain unemployed longer than they otherwise would.

This occurs for obvious reasons: Workers respond to incentives. Unemployment benefits reduce the incentive and the pressure to find a new job by making it less costly to remain without work. Consequently workers with UI benefits look for new jobs less rigorously than do workers without them. The typical unemployed worker spends about 32 minutes a day looking for a new job. Workers eligible for UI benefits spend only 20 minutes a day looking for work during their 15th week of unemployment. They look much harder when their benefits are about to end, spending more than 70 minutes a day job hunting in the 26th week of unemployment.

… Since workers with unemployment benefits search less rigorously for work until their benefits are about to expire, it takes them longer to find new jobs. Labor economists estimate that extending the potential duration of unemployment benefits by 13 weeks increases the average amount of time workers on UI remain unemployed by two weeks.

This has economic consequences. Workers do not create economic wealth during the additional weeks they remain unemployed. They save and consume less because UI insurance replaces only a portion of their wages. Labor markets become less flexible because it takes more time for workers to transition from one industry or state to another. This hinders economic growth.

Of course continuously extending unemployment benefits hinders growth. The question which champions of the dependency state seek to avoid addressing is whether that hindrance and the direct cost of the benefits themselves are worth it when compared to other potential benefits which might include such things as keeping families from breaking apart or in some cases preventing homelessness. So they pretend that there really is no cost — and that's even before getting into the extent to which those who are working become demoralized when they see their neighbors sliding by relatively effortlessly.

The authors go on to debunk the assumption that ever dollar of unemployment benefits equals an additional dollar cycling through the economy, noting that "For a large number of families, extended UI benefits do less to increase consumption than to provide alternative financing for consumption that would nonetheless take place."

There may be justifications for extending benefits, but doing so because it's good for the economy isn't one of them. A reporter at the self-described Essential Global News Network shouldn't be echoing the talking points of Nancy Pelosi and Sherrod Brown while pretending there isn't another side to the story. But apparently that's just another day at the office for Andrew Taylor and The Administration's Press.

Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.

Washington Post media reporter Paul Farhi charged in the Sunday Outlook section that conservatives are the bigger liars with sub-rosa e-mail gossip chains: "when it comes to generating and sustaining specious and shocking stories, there’s no contest. The majority of the junk comes from the right, aimed at the left."

Who did the measuring of this tilt? Why, the Washington Post fact checker, of course, and Politifact.com (run out of the liberal St. Petersburg Ties) and FactCheck.org, run by the liberal Annenberg Center at the University of Pennysylvania. In other words, the liberal media-political complex is claiming to be "nonpartisan" again. 

Nonpartisan debunkers such as FactCheck.org, Snopes.com, PolitiFact.com, Emery and The Washington Post’s Fact Checker have been chasing down these tales and dousing them like three-alarm fires for years. (There’s even a chain e-mail that paints Snopes as a liberal cover-up for the White House.) It’s often difficult for these myth-busters to say with certainty where a falsehood began. But the numbers are clear.

Of the 79 chain e-mails about national politics deemed false by PolitiFact since 2007, only four were aimed at Republicans. Almost all of the rest concern Obama or other Democrats.

Farhi quoted Ari Fleischer as the only feint toward conservatives or Republicans in the piece but Fleischer wasn't quoted challenging the Farhi thesis. How scientific is Snopes, for example, in "turning up" false political e-mails? Do they rely on tips, and sent by whom? Can a "nonpartisan" site be an easy mark for partisan sources? (Farhi links to that Soros-funded group run by David Brock, for example.)

Snopes turned up 46 viral e-mails regarding Bush during his eight years in office. By contrast, in just four years as a candidate and as president, Obama has been the subject of 100 such chain e-mails. The difference is not just in number but in kind: Twenty of the 46 Bush e-mails checked by Snopes turned out to be true, and many of these flattered or praised him. Only 10 e-mails about Obama have been true, and almost every one of them has been negative.

Emery estimates that more than 80 percent of the political e-mails that he’s vetted over the past decade were written from a conservative point of view. “The use of forwarded e-mail to spread [false information] around is overwhelmingly a right-wing phenomenon,” he said.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was a frequent target of chain e-mailers when she was speaker of the House, recalls Snopes founder David Mikkelson. But he can’t recall a single urban myth about her successor, Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio). Even former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, who inspires apoplexy among liberals, hasn’t rated much on the e-mail circuit since her stint as Sen. John McCain’s running mate in 2008.

Palin hasn't been lied about much? This is where the article just underlines how the "fact checkers" aren't interested in "defending" Sarah Palin.

Wacky e-mails making demonstrably ridiculous and unsubstantiated claims about Obama are despicable. The media loves grasping on them to tar conservatives as a whole. It all comes around to a familiar liberal media-elite thesis. The "gatekeepers" have lost their power to dominate, meaning the lies run wild now, when they never did when the liberam media dominated:

Changes in the news media landscape have also helped lies to thrive. A generation or more ago, powerful gatekeepers — large newspapers, broadcast networks, a news magazine or two — dominated the dissemination of national news. No more.

“There was a mainstream media that acted as a filter,” says Bill Adair, the editor of PolitiFact. Now, the filter is overwhelmed. “The Internet is a megaphone that spreads conspiracies quickly before there’s anyone to correct the facts,” he says. “There’s no one between your crazy uncle and his address book.”

Perhaps the best theory comes from Ari Fleischer, who served as Bush’s first press secretary. Fleischer points out that conservatives traditionally mistrust mainstream news. E-mail is another way for them to put out their own messages, countering the perceived biases of traditional media sources, he says. “If you believe the liberal media is covering up,” Fleischer explains, then you might be more susceptible to believe and pass on an outrageous e-mail.

In their deeply deceptive Friday morning story ("Deep spending cuts pose a new threat to US economy") about how the bicameral bipartisan supercommittee is supposedly going to hurt the economy with whatever results from its handiwork, Christopher Rugaber and Daniel Wagner of the Associated Press, aka The Administration's Press, "somehow" forgot to include one "little" detail, and deferred another until very late in their report.

The omission, which is that the "cuts" under consideration are really reductions in projected spending increases in future years, is sadly typical. The fact is the $1.2 trillion in "savings" the supercommittee hopes to engineer will only slightly reduce the rate of spending growth. The deferral is that the pair waited until Paragraph 18 to tell readers, and even then only incompletely, that the "deep cuts" would be spread over nine years, thereby amounting to roughly 3% of the $40.3 trillion if projected 2013-2021 spending (Page XI here). The AP pair never explains how "cuts" which wouldn't kick in until the October 1, 2012 beginning of fiscal 2013 and which are (as they have almost always been) heavily skewed towards later years would affect the current economy. Excerpts from the pair's report follow (bolds are mine):

Deep spending cuts pose a new threat to US economy

Just as the U.S. economy is making progress despite Europe's turmoil, here come two new threats.

A congressional panel is supposed to agree by Thanksgiving on a deficit-reduction package of at least $1.2 trillion. If it fails, federal spending would automatically be cut by that amount starting in 2013.

Congress may also let emergency unemployment aid and a Social Security tax cut expire at year's end.

Either outcome could slow growth and spook markets…. The 12-member bipartisan panel, or supercommittee, was created in August to defuse a political standoff over raising the federal borrowing limit. If it can't agree on a deficit-reduction plan, automatic spending cuts would hit programs prized by both parties: social services such as Medicare for Democrats, defense for Republicans.

… Many economists hoped that an extension of the Social Security tax cuts and unemployment benefits would be part of a supercommittee deal. Congress could extend those benefits separately. But it would be under pressure to offset the cost to avoid raising the deficit.

The Social Security tax cut gave most Americans an extra $1,000 to $2,000 this year. Unemployment benefits provide about $300 a week. Most of that money quickly and directly boosts consumer spending, which drives the economy.

… If the automatic spending cuts take effect, the defense budget could be cut by nearly $500 billion over nine years. Some contractors are nervous.

It takes eighteen paragraphs for readers to learn that the supposedly "deep cuts" involved are actually spread over nine years. Even then, the AP pair, by tying the spread-out only to defense, may give many the impression that other cuts all occur in fiscal 2013.

One can't help but think that the entire point of Rugaber's and Wagner's story was to create something, anything, to append to a predetermined "deep cuts" headline which would show up on news tickers, computers, smartphones and other devices for the sole purpose of creating anger and anxiety. There aren't any "deep cuts" as an ordinary person would understand the term, and they don't pose any immediate "threat" to economic growth. Those facts hardly seem to matter.

Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.

For years NewsBusters has informed readers of the tremendous financial ties to spreading the anthropogenic global warming myth.

On Sunday, coincidentally  the second anniversary of 2010's ClimateGate scandal, Britain's Daily Mail exposed the BBC's Roger Harrabin for having taken £15,000 from the very university at the heart the damning email messages demonstrating a nefarious collusion between the world's top climate alarmists:

A senior BBC journalist accepted £15,000 in grants from the university at the heart of the ‘Climategate’ scandal – and later went on to cover the story without declaring an interest to viewers.

Roger Harrabin, the BBC’s ‘environment analyst’, used the money from the University of East Anglia’s Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research to fund an ‘ad hoc’ partnership he ran with a friend.

Mr Harrabin, an influential figure who both broadcasts and advises other BBC journalists, later reported extensively about Climategate.

Readers might recognize Harrabin as the BBC reporter who materially altered an article back in April 2008 to incite climate hysteria. It was later discovered that he had done so under pressure from a global warming activist.

Now, as the Daily Mail reports, we find out that he's taken money from ClimateGate U:

In none of Mr Harrabin’s reports on the [ClimateGate] were the grants that he and his friend Dr Joe Smith had received from UEA ever mentioned. However, BBC insiders claim that the use to which the money was put – annual Real World seminars for top BBC executives on issues including climate change – had a significant impact on the Corporation’s output.

‘The seminars organised by Roger and his friend were part of a process which has effectively stifled all debate within the BBC about man-made global warming,’ said one senior journalist. ‘As far as the high-ups are concerned, the science is settled.’

But there's more:

Disclosure of the payments to Mr Harrabin’s private partnership comes in the wake of a damning report last week by the BBC Trust Editorial Standards Committee.

It revealed ‘sponsored’ documentaries on environmental issues, whose production costs had been met by ‘non-commercial’ bodies such as the UN Environmental Programme, have been shown frequently on the BBC World news channel without viewers being made properly aware of their funding.

Trust investigators discovered that of a sample of 60 sponsored programmes broadcast between February and July this year, a total of 15 breached the BBC’s editorial guidelines.

The investigators said some of the breaches involved direct conflicts of interests – with the funders being the subjects of the programmes they were paying for – and that others failed to observe BBC rules on telling viewers where the programme budget had come from.

That's some pretty ugly stuff when you think about it. And it gets worse as Christopher Booker of Britain's Telegraph reported Saturday:

The story of the BBC’s bias on global warming gets ever murkier. Last week there was quite a stir over a new report for the BBC Trust which criticised several programmes for having been improperly funded or sponsored by outside bodies. One, for instance, lauded the work of Envirotrade, a Mauritius-based firm cashing in on the global warming scare by selling “carbon offsets”, which it turned out had given the BBC money to make the programme.

Just as this scandal broke, I was also completing a report, to be published next month by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, on the BBC’s coverage of climate change. It ranges from the puffing of scare stories dreamed up by “climate activists”, to BBC reporting on wind farms, often no more than shameless propaganda for the wind industry. Part of the story told in my report is the unhealthily close relationship that developed between the BBC and organisations professionally involved in the “warmist” cause.

Some years back, the BBC adopted a new editorial policy –that the scientific and political “consensus” on climate change was now so overwhelming that it should be actively promoted, while climate sceptics, or “deniers” as the BBC calls them, should be kept off the airwaves.

A key moment in developing the new party line was a “high-level seminar” in 2006, attended by a bevy of top BBC executives. It was organised by Roger Harrabin, one of its senior environmental correspondents, and Dr Joe Smith, a geographer and climate activist from the Open University. They had set up the Cambridge Media and Environment Programme to promote the consensus line on global warming, funded by, among others, the Department for the Environment (then in charge of government policy on climate change) and WWF, one of the leading warmist pressure groups.

Now according to the Daily, we find out that Harrabin and Smith received money from UEA:

Mr Harrabin’s partnership with Dr Smith – the Cambridge Media Environment Programme (CMEP) – began in 1996. That was when Mr Harrabin spent a sabbatical at Cambridge University, where Dr Smith was working at the time. [...]

[Smith's] own opinion, which he sets out on his website, is that ‘everyday human activity – moving, eating, keeping warm or cool – is gently stoking a slow-boil apocalypse’. He calls climate change ‘one of the challenges of the age’ and urges the world to take radical action. A Freedom of Information Act disclosure obtained by Andrew Montford, who writes the climate-change blog Bishop Hill, reveals that the Tyndall Centre provided £5,000 a year for three years from 2002.

So individuals with tremendous sway over the BBC's reporting on global warming had been receiving money from the university at the heart of the ClimateGate scandal since 2002.

Isn't that special?

(H/T Steve Milloy via Marc Morano)

A rather extraordinary thing happened Sunday.

CNN's Howard Kurtz actually took Bill O'Reilly's side in the Lincoln book dispute the Fox News host is having with Kurtz's former employer the Washington Post (video follows with transcript and commentary):

HOWARD KURTZ, HOST OF RELIABLE SOURCES: Now, you may be aware that Bill O'Reilly wasn't too pleased when The Washington Post ran a story headlined "Ford's Theater Bans O'Reilly's Lincoln Book for Errors" and quoted experts as saying the book "Killing Lincoln" had plenty of mistakes.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BILL O'REILLY, FOX NEWS ANCHOR: In 325 pages there are four minor misstatements, all of which have been corrected. There are also two typeset errors, one involving a date. Now, that's a pretty good record, even for nitpickers who want to hurt the book. We well understand our enemies are full of rage about success. We also know the media lies at will these days with little accountability.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KURTZ: Well, I don't know about the rage and the lies, but the mistakes were pretty minor, and The Post had to run a correction. The book is available in the Ford's Theater gift shop, but not in its basement book shop.

So, I have to side with O'Reilly on this one, he got a bum rap.

Was that a pig that just flew by my window?

Makes you wonder if Kurtz made a bet with someone and was required to defend a Fox commentator on national television if he lost.

When you’re confused about conventional diabetes wisdom, or you’re too hairy to make your infusion sites stick, who you gonna call? Yup, you guessed it: you can call on us at our weekly, quirky diabetes advice column, Ask D’Mine,…

Tinnitus is a condition that leads to a constant ringing, whistling, buzzing or hissing sound in the ears. Although it may sound harmless enough, it can be extremely destructive, causing depression, stress, lack of sleep and even hearing problems. Why risk something that’s so preventable? Here’s a guide to four of the main tinnitus causes [...]

Chris Matthews on Saturday slammed Barack Obama in his worst criticism to date of the man that used to give him a thrill up is leg.

Speaking to the host of MSNBC's Weekends with Alex Witt, Matthews excoriated the President saying, "The day he got inaugurated, he sent us all home and said, 'Thank you, now watch how smart I am.' That's the worst kind of a notion of the presidency" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

ALEX WITT, HOST: You say, “Nations die or thrive on the ability and judgment of their leaders to stir them at perilous times.” Does Barack Obama have that ability to pass the proper judgment, to properly analyze and to stir this nation?

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Well, he has great analytical ability. Clearly has made the right judgments in his executive leadership. He has moved us very effectively in self-defense in fighting terrorism. I'm not sure he's able to move the country. He had that ability as a candidate, and then the day he was inaugurated, with the Mall filled with people, African-Americans and everyone else, he sent us all home. It was the worst mistake of his presidency. The day he got inaugurated, he sent us all home and said, “Thank you, now watch how smart I am.” That's the worst kind of a notion of the presidency.

The presidency's not about being smart. Most of our great presidents have not been that brilliant. Kennedy wasn’t brilliant. Roosevelt certainly wasn’t brilliant. Truman wasn’t. But what they did was they lead the American people. They lead us. This is so simple. If I could say one thing to Barack Obama, “Stop showing us how smart you are and lead us. Ask us to do something. Pull us behind you. Enlist us in the service of our country. Ask us to do something." There is no Peace Corps. There is no Special Forces. There is no 50 mile hikes. There’s no moon program. There’s nothing to root for.

What are we trying to do in this administration? Why does he want a second term? Would he tell us? What's he going to do in the second term? More of this? Is this it? Is this as good as it gets? Where are we going? Are we going to do something the second term? He has yet to tell us. He has not said one thing about what he would do in the second term. He never tells us what he is going to do with reforming our healthcare systems, Medicare, Medicaid, how is going to reform Social Security. Is he going to deal with long-term debt? How? Is he going to reform the tax system? How? Just tell us. Why are we in this fight with him? Just tell us, Commander, give us our orders and tell us where we’re going, give us the mission. And he hasn't done it.

And I think it's the people around him, too many people around, they’re little kids with propellers on their heads. They're all virtual. Politics, this social networking, I get these e-mails, you probably get them. I'm tired of getting them. Stop giving them to me. I want to meet people. Their idea of running a campaign is a virtual universe of sending e-mails around to people. No it's not. It's meetings with people, it’s forging alliances. It's White House meetings and dinner parties that go on till midnight, and he should be sitting late at night now with senators and members of Congress and governors working together on how they're going to win this political fight that's coming.

I don't have a sense that he's ever had a meeting. I hear stories that you will not believe. Not a single phone call since the last election.

WITT: Tell me one.

MATTHEWS: They don't call. He never calls. That's the, that’s the message. Members of Congress, I keep asking, “When did you hear from him last?”

WITT: Silence.

MATTHEWS: He doesn't like their company.

WITT: You've just…

MATTHEWS: That's a problem, by the way.

WITT: You're just giving a bunch of contradictions in terms of the differences between Jack Kennedy and Barack Obama. Are there comparisons?

MATTHEWS: Differences.

WITT: Right, differences…

MATTHEWS: Well, they’re both young, they’re both very well-educated, they’re both idealistic, they’re both incredibly well spoken, articulate, whatever the word is. They have a great sense of poetry. They know how to say the right things about our country. Obama is wonderfully skilled at evoking what America’s all about. I think he's great at it. He thrills me when he does it. In fact, that's one of the reasons I was inspired by him. He talked about our country. He evokes our country from his background. But once having won the office he seemed to think that that was the end of it in terms of his connection to the American people.

Don't you feel, I think everybody feels an absence of communication from the time he's been elected. And it's not about not being left-wing enough or too left. That's not his problem. It's connection. And Mrs. Obama, she's an amazing asset. And what has she done? Obesity? How about connecting with the American people about being Americans? I don't think she's, I don't think she's happy. I don't think they like being in the White House. The American people can tell that. They don't seem thrilled at the fact the American people have selected them as our first family. I don't sense the gratitude, the happiness level, the thrill of being president. Bill Clinton loved being president every minute and you knew it.

WITT: You did get that sense.

MATTHEWS: And that's what the American people liked. They like knowing their President's happy.

Interesting these statements were aired early Saturday morning when few people would see them. Would Matthews say these things in prime time?

Assuming this is really what he thinks, will it matter at all once a Republican presidential nominee has been named and we're in the heart of the campaign next year?

Or will Matthews as the dutiful shill continue to attack Obama's opponents while speaking glowingly of the man he's currently complaining about in order to assure a second term irrespective of the short-comings herein described?

Yes, that's a rhetorical question.

(H/T @IKIDYOUNOT)

A week after HBO's Bill Maher called Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich "a fat womanizing blowhard," NBC's Jay Leno referred to the former House Speaker as a "hot air balloon."

Tonight Show guest Meghan McCain actually thought that was funny (video follows with transcript and commentary):

MEGHAN MCCAIN: You know, it’s really sad to see the primary process turn into this, this kind of anything but Romney scenario that’s happening.

JAY LENO, HOST: Yeah, because Newt Gingrich was just out of it, and now he seems to be rising.

MCCAIN: Yeah.

LENO: And well hot air balloons do that, but yeah. That’s my joke.

After all these years in comedy, Leno should know that a joke is lousy if you actually have to tell the recipient it's a joke.

Honestly – fat jokes, Jay?